Robobrains have been a staple of the Fallout universe for ages. Ever wonder where the brains sitting atop those mech noggins actually come from, though?

Fallout 4's first DLC, Automatron, is all about the player’s quest to stop the robotic underlings unleashed by the Mechanist (pictured above.) In the process of infiltrating the Mechanist’s lair, the player goes deep into a Robco facility—where they can find out the dark origin of Fallout 4's Robobrains. Spoilers ahead, obviously.

As it turns out, Robobrains are the result of immoral experiments conducted by RobCo Industries. The organization took convicts and criminals and extracted their brains without consent...all without really knowing what the effects would be. Some robots would ‘wake up’ and freak out because they had no idea what had happened to them. And if the brain happened to remember its former life, RobCo would try to wipe it clean. It wouldn’t always work, and so RobCo found itself discarding these robots if there was even a hint of ‘malfunction.’ Whatever semblance of a person was left in these robots would basically get flushed down the toilet, just so that RobCo could make some shitty robots. (Seriously, Robobrains aren’t very good. I will not be making any custom Robobrains in the ‘build a robot’ portion of the DLC!)

Maybe you’ve paid attention to Fallout lore in the past and know some of this history. Still, I felt intrigued (and disgusted) by the logs in Fallout 4's DLC, especially as I learned more about the scientists at the heart of it all. Some excerpts, click to enlarge: